I would recommend idraw3 charamaker and/or GraphicsGale. The former is designed entirely for spriting and the latter has many of the same features, and they're both free. Dunno why you'd want to sprite one pixel at a time in photoshop, but whatever works for you, I guess.
as apposed to spriting pixel by pixel in every other god damn program......... thats the name of the game besides. in photoshop you get all the bonus things that make painting easier too,
As opposed to having a bunch of pixel-based drawing and guide tools in the other programs. Photoshop was designed primarily for regular artwork and photo manipulation, not for pixel anything, so you have... the pencil tool, and... the pencil tool... and... er... yeah. This is an honest question, do you all really make sprites one pixel at a time? Because I don't.
I've recently been using a program by the name of "piq" It's basically an art program that's meant for pixeling. http://piq.codeus.net/ It's a free browser program also, I suggest using the advanced beta version of it though cause it's better
Pixel art= not my thing. I need some more practice if I'm ever gonna make a mildly good-looking sprite.
MS paint is fine and simple to use with nothing even remotely confusing. The only thing I wish it had was a layer system... but I can easily make up for the fact that I use the color replace tool
Well if you want the boring textbook definition, "Pixel art is a form of digital art, created through the use of raster graphics software, where images are edited on the pixel level...." I think this is sort of like arguing that 8 bit art is pixel art and 16 bit is something entirely different (when it's not). To me, if you can draw the picture in MS paint with the pencil tool, it's pixel art.
"Pixel Level" does not mean "Pixel by Pixel", it means "Pixel Level" It can be as small as a game sprite or as large as a painting, and I've seen both. Generally, I'll be between 4x and 12x zoom, and I'll use the line and curve tools to draw out the basic shapes, then use selections and the pencil to color them, and never at a size of 1px. I only ever really use the 1px pencil when I'm making small corrections here and there.